Liebhaber's memory : indigenous and colonial modes of space/time perception and discourse in eleven novels of the Canadian west
Date
1988
Authors
Guppy, Stephen
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Abstract
A number of novels by western Canadian writers depict a confrontation between the rationalistic perspective of a colonial empire and the mythic world-view of a society that has been or is in the process of being assimilated into or destroyed by that colonial power. In some of these novels, the colonized society is one of the indigenous cultures of the region; in others, however, the colonized society is an analogous culture, such as the Irish people depicted in Jack Hodgins' The Invention of the World or the residents of the rural British Columbian village depicted in Hodgins' second novel, The Resurrection of Joseph Bourne. (For the purpose of simplicity, all such colonized societies will be referred to in this study as "indigenous " and what is said regarding the most commonly-depicted of these societies, the Native Indians and Metis of the west, will be understood to refer to all such peoples.)
The confrontation between colonizer and colonized depicted in the western Canadian novels with which this study is concerned is imaged as a confrontation between radically differing modes of space/time perception. Modern European man (i. e . the colonists) perceives and conceptualizes space and time in terms of geometrical abstractions: space is seen as rectilinear, time as linear extension. So-called "primitive" man, conversely, perceives his environment in terms of his relationship to the sacred: all space is seen as actually or potentially numinous, all time as a cycle. As time is seen as a cycle and space as being organized around the central point at which the· sacred is manifested in the profane, "primitive" man's world is essentially circular. The central symbol of "primitive" society, then, is the circle; the world of western European man, on the other hand, is defined by the rectilinear form, the straight line, the grid.
Both indigenous and colonial cultures impose an ordering principle on the spatial environment in which-they live, but each sees the other's sense of order as a lack of order as chaos. For western European man, space that has not been "mapped" ( organized in terms of geometrical abstractions) is seen as pre-Creational chaos; the world must be created by being transformed into abstractions--maps and names. For "primitive" man, space that has not been "consecrated" (organized around the point at which the sacred intrudes into the profane) is seen as formless, as the void. For colonial society, then, the wilderness is chaos, a fallen world to which he has been exiled, while for the indigenous culture, the colonial power's world is a world ' which has no centre and thus no order, a void into which he is inevitably set adrift by the colonists' appropriation of his land.
The colonial society that explored and settled the New World perceived space in terms of the abstractions of the map; it also, however, perceived the area that had not been "mapped" (i.e. assimilated into colonial society) as the uncreated world, as chaos. This perception of the New World as chaos is reflected in the numerous depictions in western Canadian novels of the landscape as an ocean or a wasteland. Conversely, the indigenous culture perceives space and time that has not been "consecrated" in terms of its own sense of order as chaos.
The homogeneity and abstraction that characterizes the colonial society's perception of space and time is, according to communications theorist Harold Innis, directly related to western European man's dominant mode of communications the written word. Alphabetic writing, according to Innis, provides man with a "transpersonal memory" and thus allows him to divorce his sense of space and time from his own perceptions: time becomes linear historical time and space the geometrical abstractions of the map, Thus the opposition of indigenous and colonial perceptions of space and time is rooted in the more fundamental opposition of the two cultures' dominant modes o:f discourse: the oral and the written.
In the study that :follows, the opposition of indigenous and colonial modes o:f space/time perception and discourse is discussed in relation to eleven novels by five western Canadian writers: Sheila Watson, Howard O'Hagan , Rudy Wiebe , Jack Hodgins and Robert Kraetsch.